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Scott Walker: The Wall along the Canadian Border Was a Figment of My Imagination Erroneously Attributed to Me

So here is how Scott Walker’s opinion on building a wall along the entire U.S. and Canadian border has changed, once that the idea began to be lambasted as ludicrous.

It started with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press on Sunday:

“Todd: We are talking about the southern border and building a fence there. We don’t talk about the northern border, where this is about securing the border from potential terrorists coming over.

“Walker: Well….

“Todd: Do you want to build a wall north of the border?

“Walker: Some people have asked us about that in New Hampshire. They raised some very legitimate concerns, including some law enforcement folks that brought that up to me at one of our town hall meetings about a week and a half ago. So that is a legitimate issue for us to look at.”

It ended yesterday with Walker asserting:

“I’ve never talked about a wall up in the north, I’m certainly not now. That’s just what happens when things get run amok.”

So, to be clear, Walker is now suggesting that the idea has somehow become wrongly attributed to him—that he not only does not support the building of such a wall but that he never even suggested it as a possibility in the first place.

In the age of YouTube and viral videos, it is an incredible assertion. In effect, his wish that he had not said it has, over the course of just a few days, been transformed into a conviction that he did not say it.

3 thoughts on “Scott Walker: The Wall along the Canadian Border Was a Figment of My Imagination Erroneously Attributed to Me”

Oddly, but actually logically enough, the threat to the US from its northern border is terrorist infiltration. Long before 9/11 it was common knowledge that entry into Canada through the airport in Montreal has been a favored venue for undocumented middle-Eastern immigrants to the US. In fact, I recall this being discussed at a Canadian-US colloquium held in the vicinity of Montreal in the 90s.

Thus we have seen a tightening up of border controls with the north border, e.g. driver’s licenses alone are no longer permitted for back and forth travel to Canada, now requiring passports. Yet that is essentially a ludicrous procedure given the vast porous border along the northern parallel. This only serves to highlight the thinly-veiled racism as the primary political motivating factor for concerns about the southern border alone.

Your comment raises an interesting point. Before Trump made his inflammatory characterizations of the undocumented immigrants entering the U.S. across the border with Mexico, some of the anti-immigrant rhetoric did focus on the threat of terrorists crossing unnoticed among those immigrants. Although it was never explained by terrorists who had successfully penetrated our borders would carelessly leave such items behind, there were regular reports of “Islamic garments” and copies of the Koran being found by members of volunteer border militias. Although one has to come perilously close to reinforcing racial or ethnic stereotypes in order even to make the following point, this fear of terrorist infiltration seemed to be based on the dubious assumption that Arabs and those of other ethnicities from the Middle East would be completely indistinguishable from Latin Americans.

In any case, if terrorist infiltration is the primary concern, then a wall along either border would seem a very expensive and almost certainly not a cost-effective option. Even if the wall could be monitored electronically so that anyone trying to go over, through, or under it would be instantly detected and efficiently apprehended, the access to ships and planes from anywhere in the hemisphere and beyond would seem to provide ready alternatives for terrorists with any sort of financial support. Indeed, any terrorist with such support can probably acquire a counterfeit visa that would allow him or her to pass undetected through existing checkpoints at the borders.

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